News analysis: Hezbollah seen surviving UN troop expansion

The Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah will survive the arrival in south Lebanon of an expanded U.N. force by lying low for a time to concentrate on reconstruction in south Lebanon, analysts said on Tuesday.

By ReutersAugust 29, 2006

BEIRUT -- The Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah will survive the arrival in south Lebanon of an expanded U.N. force by lying low for a time to concentrate on reconstruction in south Lebanon, analysts said on Tuesday.

The U.N. force, in place since 1978 but now to be strengthened by extra European troops and a new mission, will limit Hezbollah’s freedom of action but the guerrillas have in the past found ways to bypass such restrictions, they said.

Despite some reservations about the peacekeepers, Hezbollah will not seek confrontation unless the U.N. force makes a foolish mistake or Hezbollah feels at some stage that the United Nations threatens its armed existence, they added.

The expanded force, known as UNIFIL II, is the U.N. Security Council’s answer to a month of conflict which started when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12. More than 1,300 people were killed in the war.

Israel and the United States had hoped that during the war Israeli armed forces would destroy Hezbollah, a Shi’ite Muslim movement set up in response to the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, which lasted from 1978 to 2000.

When that failed, they tried to disarm the guerrillas through the U.N. Security Council, which said on Aug. 11 that the area between the Israeli border and the Litani river to the north should be "free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL".

But European governments and the United Nations have ruled out any attempt to disarm Hezbollah by force, carry out house-to-house weapons searches, or deploy U.N. troops to prevent any arms shipments reaching Hezbollah from Syria.

"The new formula is not a significant departure from the past... The restrictions (on Hezbollah) will be cosmetic because the arms were never displayed anyway," said Amal Saad Ghorayeb, an expert on Hezbollah at Lebanese American University.

For many years, especially after Israeli troops withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah took extraordinary measures to conceal its military preparations and activities.

It built up a large arsenal of rockets and anti-tank weapons in south Lebanon, as well as a network of tunnels near the Israeli border, without running into conflict with UNIFIL.

"You would never see it in your lifetime. They maintained extremely tight security and it was all very well organised. Nobody noticed," said Timur Goksel, a former UNIFIL spokesman who now teaches at the American University of Beirut.

Goksel said the arrival of more U.N. troops and the stronger mandate would however make life more difficult for Hezbollah.

The guerrillas have already withdrawn from frontline posts near the disputed Shebaa Farms area, which since 2000 has been the main area of military conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

Lebanon and Syria say the enclave is Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory. Israel and the United Nations say it is part of the Syrian Golan Heights and hence beyond the scope of U.N. resolutions telling Israel to leave Lebanon.

"That friction point has been eliminated for the moment. I don’t see conflict unless the United Nations makes a big mistake or a different agenda appears, which I doubt very much because most countries are very careful," Goksel said.

Governments contributing troops to UNIFIL will remember that Shi’ite Muslim suicide bombers killed some 300 U.S. and French members of a multinational force in Beirut in 1983.

Paul Salem, director designate of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said that Hezbollah would retain its fighters and its arms caches but would not have the same freedom of manoeuvre as it has had in the past.

Hezbollah and its allies, the governments in Tehran and Damascus, will also have to reconsider the role of the guerrillas as a deterrent against Israeli attacks on Iran and Syria, he added. "Once you use a deterrent, you lose it. It’s no longer an unknown quantity," he added.

Commentator Michael Young of Beirut’s Daily Star said he foresaw problems in the long term, with the possibility that Hezbollah might try to discredit UNIFIL.

"Down the road we don’t know. At some point if Hezbollah feels it is threatened by the danger of its neutralisation it will take whatever steps are necessary," he said.

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